TRANSLATING RIO
I went to Rio de Janeiro to make a movie called “The Game of Their Lives”. I’m not an actor in the strictest sense of the word, but I play one in movies. Basically I’m a stand-up comedian who can, from time to time, fake it enough to be cast. I was in Steven Soderbergh’s “King of the Hill”. I got a nice little speaking role as “the Golfer in the Orange Pants”; I’ve done several indie films for up-and-coming young directors that I’m hoping will hire me when they arrive in the big time.
But, in the “Game of Their Lives” I had a feature role, my name in the credits with the stars, and a character with a name (Walter Geisler), instead of being billed as “Cop on the City Hall Steps”, or “Thug Number Two”. We shot part of the film in St. Louis and part in Rio de Janeiro.
They speak Portuguese down there, which is somewhat like Spanish, but as if there were extra words they had taught in the classes you slept through. Of course, as a red-blooded, card carrying American I didn’t know a word of Portuguese when I got there. I didn’t even know they spoke Portuguese until I got there. Still, I figured I wouldn’t have to learn it because I was brought up watching ‘Star Trek’, and I know that everybody in the entire galaxy already speaks English.
It was the same with the Brazilians. I asked a man on the beach if he spoke English. He said, “A little”; turned out he meant a little more than most people in Alabama. If, as they say, communication is 93% non-verbal, then I figured I could get around just fine by just pantomiming what I wanted. It worked well except if you needed to find a bathroom. There’s no polite way to mime that.
Alejandro, the doorman at our hotel, the Marina All-Suites in Leblanc, was a game little fellow. Between the two of us we knew enough of the other’s language to say hello, wave goodbye, and that’s about it. In fact he was so ignorant of any other languages that he would have made a hell of an American. But, God love him, he tried.
We would generally run into each other in the lobby every morning, me walking through the lobby door, him holding it open. On one particularly nasty, rainy morning, he greeted me with a smile. I smiled back, and, as I walked past him he pointed skyward, and made a yucky face. I acknowledged his expression with a similar one of my own, and we both nodded in agreement, pleased with ourselves that, like two mutes, we had managed to talk about the weather without uttering a word.
Now, sign language, especially the free style type in which Alejandro and I were engaged, is the beginning of all communication. The cave person didn’t have a common word for ‘up’, so he just grunted to get your attention and then indicated, by extending the first finger at the end of his outstretched arm, where he wanted you to look. And in the earliest days even this method wasn’t entirely fool proof as there was a better than average chance that the person to whom you were directing your action would fail to get the point, and, instead of looking at where you were indicating, would stare at what you were indicating with. So you’re pointing frantically in the direction of the large boulder about to come crashing down on his head, and he’s transfixed on the tip of your finger, wondering what’s got a hold of it to make it jump around like that. That must have been how organized communication came about. To keep from constantly witnessing your pals being crushed by boulders, or eaten by things out of the range of their peripheral vision, everyone had to agree that a particular motion meant a particular thing. So we got ‘stop’, and ‘come on’, and ‘howdy-do’, and, eventually, ‘stick-it-where-the-grass don’t grow’. Next, would be the formulation of sounds to form “words” which would allow you to communicate out of range of your companion’s sight that a boulder was about to drop on him. The next step would combine a word with a gesture to add color, and ambiance, and nuance; that’s where Alejandro was having problems. He would point to himself, and say “you” when he meant “I”; he would point to me and say “I” when he meant “you”; so in his hybrid spoken/sign language it came across as “You will get I a cab.” I knew what he meant, but trying to correct him had the effect of tossing him into a vat of liquid hydrogen—he froze to the point of shattering. So I let it go. In fact, I adapted to his method and responded in kind, with the points and everything: “You are thankful to me for hailing that cab.” The ultimate result of all this human miscommunication is the invention of the hydrogen bomb.
Terri, my wife, has her own gestures; ones that she alone can decipher; ones that don’t indicate anything: Broad, sweeping maneuvers with her hands that she makes in the air. She supplements them with a simultaneous English translation, spoken loudly and slowly, so that onlookers, who don’t comprehend even a loud, slow version of our language, will be entertained by a hand ballet.
It’s one thing to pantomime the use of a knife and fork, or to point at something and maintain a quizzical expression. But Terri’s method is unique in that, though her movements are meaningless, they nevertheless get her meaning across. For example, she asked a waiter, in a voice so thunderous it caused every head in the place to twirl quizzically in our direction, “What time does the restaurant close?” The theory behind here method is that anything spoken with sufficient volume arouses a primal instinct, activating a sort of universal translator in the listener, allowing them to become instantaneously fluent in that tongue. So, increasing the decibels slightly she repeats her inquiry, emphasizing a different word. “What time does the restaurant close?” The waiter stares blankly at her for a handful of seconds hoping, I imagine, that if he keeps still long enough he will become invisible. And then, miraculously, somewhere in the echo of his brain he re-hears the word “close”, and, mistaking it for its homonym, “clothes”, he pinches a bit of the fabric of his shirt and haltingly whispers, “Clothes?” But Terri is undaunted. “No, no”, she says, then repeats the question, louder, and this time it is accompanied by a mysterious series of gestures, executed with karate-like precision, that approximate the handshake of a secret society whose meaning and existence is known only to members. “What time does the restaurant close?” she asks again, and, like a bogus interpreter for the deaf, she forms, in succession, an airborne semi-circle with the index finger of her right hand; her left hand swings outward giving the appearance of a street mime holding a serving tray; the right hand comes out of the semi-circle with the palm facing outward in the manner of a traffic cop giving the “stop” sign. The routine culminates with both hands meeting quickly in the “prayer position” and then, separating, they drop heavily to her sides. I watch and shake my head with the same exasperation that Mr. Dithers reserves for Dagwood. But for the waiter, somehow, a light bulb goes on, and, with the enthusiasm of the guy who’s ready to solve the ‘”Wheel of Fortune” puzzle he smiles widely at Terri and announces, complete with hand gesture, “Two a.m.!”
Terri was with me in Rio for the first twelve days. She is by nature a gregarious person, and would never let something like language get in the way of communication. Even in her native tongue she has a way of taking a statement and turning it into an adventure, as was the case with the cab drivers in Rio. Like American cab drivers, they don’t speak any English. (Basically they pride themselves on knowing their way around with such proficiency that you only need to give them a street number as to your destination.) Being aware of this verbal handicap, and knowing instinctively that men of any hemisphere prefer their directions in small doses, I kept my instructions succinct and clear. “Marina All Suites, Leblon”, I said it nonchalantly without a trace of American accent, so that an eavesdropper might think that I’m Brazilian and that Portuguese is my native tongue. And then, with a flash of international savvy, I add, “Por favor.” The cab driver, noticed my fluency in Portuguese, figured that this is one American with whom he can share the beauties and treasures of his city. So, like every Brazilian, he pointed out Rio’s most famous and conspicuous landmark, Cristo, the statue of Jesus Christ, Christ Redemer (Christ the Redeemer) located atop the Corcovado Mountain at a height of 710 meters.
“See?” he said, showing off a little of his keen knowledge of English, “Christo!” He said it with the flair of a magician who has just pulled a gorilla out of a thimble. He pointed up to it and smiled, beamed, with pride and reverence. And he was doing it while driving 60 miles an hour with his head turned completely to us in the back seat. He couldn’t have been prouder of that statue if he had built it himself. “Christo?” I understood him instinctively. He put it in the form of a question, thereby asking us if we would like to go there. Having already been there, the correct response would have been, “No, obrigado. (no thank you) Marina-All-Suites, Leblon.” Instead, Terri says, “Oh, yesterday we went to the Botanical Garden! It’s such a beautiful place! We have a botanical garden where we live in St. Louis that’s very beautiful, too.” The driver, a red-blooded Latin lover of women listens, spellbound, his head turned completely to her in the back seat, going 60 miles an hour.
When you’re trying to grasp what someone is saying in a foreign language, all verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, and participles are as useless as a surprise birthday party for a Jehovah Witness. The only words of value are nouns. Proper nouns. Names of places, things, people. The only words our driver recognizes are “Botanical” and “Garden”. So he repeats them. In the form of a question, thereby asking, if he had gotten it correctly, if we would like to go there.
“Botanical Garden?”
And Terri believed that he understood what she was talking about; felt as if she has discovered the missing chunk of the Rosetta Stone, so she repeated what he said, except with exclamation points. “Sim! Sim! (Yes! Yes!) Botanical Garden!”
Our driver, caught up in the excitement of the moment, repeated what Terri said, complete with the exclamation mark. “Botanical Garden!” Drunk with the giddiness of discovery and the notion that we wanted to go to the Botanical Garden, he hung a u-turn with the G-Force of a Phantom jet in an evasive maneuver and barreled toward the Botanical Garden.
“No! No Botanical Garden, goddammit! Marina All Suites, Leblon!”
I shouted into the poor guy’s ear, my face drained of blood from the gravitational force of his turn. “Por favor,” I added in a weak attempt to cover my ‘Ugly American’ outburst.
“No Botanical Garden?” He whispered incredulously, as if he did not believe what he just heard. He slumped noticeably; his head turned sadly around to look where we were going. He was wounded, confused, like a small child whose father’s promise of a new bike has turned out to be a lie.
I saw that Terri profoundly felt this guy’s pain, and was about to cave in, and let him take us to the Botanical Garden. I shot her the wide-eyed pursed lipped look that spouses reserve for each other when they’re trying to communicate telepathically; a facial, under the table, kick-in-the-shins. She looked back with a blank stare that indicated ESP failure. Still, because her tone was apologetic when she said to the cabbie, “No. No Botanical Garden.” I breathed relief that, apparently, she had understood my psychic message after all.
But I was wrong. She gathered momentum;; her volume increased; the hand gestures came dangerously close to the driver’s head; her pronouns, articles, and conjunctions were jettisoned.
“We went Botanical Garden yesterday,” she shouts. “Craig make movie “Game of Lives”; then went Sugar Loaf.”
Sugar Loaf, the physical symbol of Rio de Janeiro ; the magnificent monolithic mountain of granite and quartz that rises 396 meters straight up out of the city’s water’s edge. Its name refers to its resemblance to the traditional shape of concentrated refined loaf sugar.
“Sugar Loaf?” The driver snapped to attention. Perhaps he misunderstood this gringo woman. “Sugar Loaf?”
“Sim! Sim!” said Terri, once again totally misunderstanding the context.
And, in a voice riddled with exclamation points, she started it all over again. “Sugar Loaf!”
“Sugar Loaf!” Our man repeated it triumphantly; he understood her misunderstanding. He blasted his horn like a bugler spearheading a cavalry attack, and he charged—against the grain—across six lanes of traffic; a boldly illegal left turn to fulfill our destiny … at Sugar Loaf.
